Praise for
MARTIN CRUZ SMITH
and
STALLION GATE

“Smith, master craftsman of the good read, has given us another dandy.”

Los Angeles Times

“Smith’s dialogue is fresh, his pace unflagging.”

People

(more)

“That Smith succeeds by keeping us fascinated is largely owing to his invention of Sergeant Joe Peña.… With his deadpan wit and tough-guy-who’s-got-a-soft-touch manner, Joe is STALLION GATE’s secret weapon: He keeps us guessing all the way to ground zero.”

Glamour

“There are plenty of rewards in this novel.… The strength of STALLION GATE is in … the wonderful descriptions of the land and the people, the contrasts between nature and the forces that have set out to conquer it.”

The Boston Globe

“A towering novel … leaves a lasting impact on the reader. This is a monumental thriller in which the tormented Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, General Leslie Groves, and other historic figures live again.”

Publishers Weekly

“A historical novel of great weight and merit … more compelling as an act of imagination … Smith skillfully blends fact and fiction to re-create the tense yet exhilarating atmosphere in which the team of scientists tries to channel the atom’s power into a weapon of unprecedented destruction.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Title Page

Copyright

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1986 Martin Cruz Smith

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material: Famous Music Publishing Companies: Excerpt from the lyrics to “That Old Black Magic,” by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. Copyright 1942 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1969 by Famous Music Corporation. MCA Inc.: Excerpt from the lyrics to “Machine Gun Butch,” words and music by Clarence Stout. Copyright 1943 by MCA Music, a Division of MCA Inc., New York, N.Y. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80974-2

v3.1

Map

NOVEMBER
1943

1

The cell at Leavenworth was four feet by eight, barely large enough for Joe to sit at one end on an upended pail, but there was room in the dark for a circle of figures. Nearest Joe was a mountain lion as gray and white in color as a snowfall at night. The cat’s spine was a rattlesnake and the snake’s scaled head peeked over the lion’s shoulder. There was a girl with the body of a bird, a swallow. She had a beautiful triangular face and her eyes looked modestly down, away from Joe, who was only in dirty GI underpants. Across from her was a minotaur, a blue man with a shaggy buffalo head. At the far end was an officer who had brought his own chair to sit on. He had a long skull and sallow skin and ears pressed almost flat into close-cut black hair. He wore the patient manner and tailored uniform of a career officer and didn’t seem the least bothered by the overhead ring of golden sticks that beat against one another in subdued claps of light.

“You’re from New Mexico, Sergeant Peña?” the captain asked.

“Yes, sir,” Joe said.

The minotaur hummed softly and rocked from side to side. Joe tried to ignore it and the captain paid no attention at all.

“You know the Jemez Mountains, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sergeant Peña, as I understand it, you’re in here for insubordination,” the captain said. “But the real fact of the matter is, you were sleeping with an officer’s wife.”

“Not lately, sir. I’ve been in the brig for twenty days, the last ten in the hole on nothing but water.”

“Which is what you deserve. There is nothing dumber in this man’s Army than consorting with the wife of a superior, you’ll admit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any ill effects?”

“Some hallucinations.”

Joe had started seeing things after the fifth day in the hole. Guards banged on the door every time he lay down, so he hadn’t slept, either. The cat had come first. Joe thought the stench of the cell would drive out even a phantasm, but after the cat came the woman on wings. It wasn’t a religious experience; it was just crowded.

“You have the feeling you’re never getting out of here, Sergeant?”

“It occurs to me, sir. I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch the name.”

“Augustino.”

“You’re a defense lawyer?”

“They didn’t want to admit you were even in the brig, Sergeant. They’ve as good as buried you. No, I’m not a lawyer, but I can get you out.”

The snake twisted its head to regard the captain with more interest.

“Why don’t you tell me how, sir?” Joe suggested.

“You haven’t been back to New Mexico recently?”

“Not for years.”

“Wasn’t too stimulating?”

“Not stimulating enough.”

While the snake watched the captain the big cat turned its yellow eyes languidly to Joe.

“I know what you mean, Sergeant. I’m from Texas myself.”

“Really, sir?”

“On my sixteenth birthday I applied for the Citadel.”

“Is that so, sir?”

“You get more dedicated officers out of the Citadel than you get from the Point.”

“Interesting, sir. Can you get me out of this fucking hole or can’t you?”

“Yes, I have the authority to get anyone I want. Sergeant, do you remember a J. Robert Oppenheimer?”

“No.”

“Jewish boy from New York? He had tuberculosis? His family sent him to New Mexico?”

“Okay. I was a kid too. That was a long time ago. We went riding.”

“To Los Alamos?”

“All over, yeah.”

“He’s back.”

“So?”

“Sergeant, the Army is setting up a project at Los Alamos. Dr. Oppenheimer is in charge, and he will need a driver. You are, in almost every particular, the perfect man. Violent enough to be a bodyguard. Ignorant enough to hear classified information and not understand a word. Be liaison.”

“Who with?”

“Indians, who else? Most of all, you might be a name Oppenheimer would recognize and trust. I put you on the list. We’ll find out.”

“If he doesn’t?”

“You’ll rot right here. If he does pick you, you’ll return to your various scams, Sergeant—I expect that. You’ll be in glory. But don’t forget who found you in this hole. I want his man to be my man. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain rapped on the door to go. Waiting for the turnkey, he added, “I hear your mother is Dolores the Potter. I have some wonderful pieces by her. How is she?”

“Wouldn’t know, sir. I haven’t been in Santiago since the war started.”

“You don’t do pottery yourself?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re not that kind of Indian?”

“Never was, sir.”

The captain took his chair with him when he left. Joe leaned back on the pail and shut his eyes to the figures who stayed in the cell with him. He could hear new apparitions arriving. Then he opened one lid and caught the girl with the swallow body lifting her eyes and giving him a wistful look. He laughed. He knew nothing about visions, but he knew women. He was getting out.

DECEMBER
1944

2

Staff Sergeant Joe Peña was playing the piano for the Christmas dance. He had a narrow face for a Pueblo Indian, a deep V of cheekbones, a broad mouth and wide-set eyes. Black hair and brows, one brow healed over an old split. His uniform was crisp, the chevron on his sleeve so bright it looked polished, his tie tucked in between the second and third buttons of his shirt. Picking out ballads on the parlor grand, he gave a first impression of a huge, attractive man. Also of damaged goods.

The lodge’s walls and columns had the honeyed glow of varnished ponderosa pine. In keeping with the Christmas theme, red and green crepe festooned wagon-wheel candelabras and the open balconies of the second floor. Paper reindeer were pinned to the Navajo rugs on the walls. Atop the eight-foot-high stone mantel of the fireplace a cardboard St. Nick stood between Indian pots.

“Everyone’s here.” Foote leaned on the piano. He was a horsey Englishman in a threadbare tuxedo.

“Not everyone,” Joe answered while he played.

“You say. Who’s not here?”

“Soldiers aren’t here, MPs aren’t here, WACs aren’t here, machinists aren’t here, Indians aren’t here.”

“Of course not, we don’t want them here. It’s not their bloody bomb. Bad enough that we have the military command. Especially Captain Augustino creeping around like a Grand Inquisitor.”

“I’m ready.” Harvey Pillsbury brought Joe a bourbon. In his other hand he carried a clarinet. “I really appreciate this second chance, Joe.”

“Just blow. Last time you were so silent it was like playing with a snowman.”

Harvey had the contours of a snowman, fair downy hair and the high, nasal accent of West Texas.

“Be prepared for quantum improvement.”

“Whatever that means.” Joe finished the drink in a swallow.

He played “Machine Gun Butch” and everyone sang along. “ ‘… was a rough and ready Yankee, / He’ll never let the old flag touch the ground. / And he always will remember the seventh of December, / With his rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat, and he’ll mow them down.’ ” The English and Italians sang loudest, and the odd thing was that Joe liked them all, Foote included and Harvey especially. Most were Americans, the majority babies straight from college. The boys had loose ties and sweaty faces; the girls had short skirts and scrolls of hair around broad, polished foreheads. A rent party in Harlem it wasn’t, but they were trying.

Harvey had stood through “A String of Pearls,” clarinet raised and trembling and utterly mute. During “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” he licked the reed, forced a squeak, two notes in a row, then three. Halfway into “This Joint Is Jumpin’,” Joe switched to a bass stride, forcing Harvey to blow erratically through a riff like a butterfly flying for its life; at the end he beamed, red-cheeked and triumphant.

“ ‘White Christmas’?” he suggested.

Joe groaned. “A little knowledge is a gruesome thing.”

There was a stir across the room as Oppy and Kitty arrived. Better than a stir: veneration. The director of the Los Alamos Project was a spindly six feet tall with a close-cropped skull and beak of a nose that emphasized tapered eyes of startling blue. Younger physicists followed him, copying the hunch of his shoulders, his air of distraction. Kitty Oppenheimer had a flat, pretty face, a frowsy dress and dark, thick hair. Her friends were European wives, who surrounded her like bodyguards.

A fingertip slid down Joe’s spine. There were people at the end of the piano, but they were watching the dancers or the Oppenheimers. Harvey was concentrating on his clarinet. The fingertip turned to fingernail. Joe glanced up at Mrs. Augustino, the captain’s wife. She looked like a cover of Life magazine, maybe “Life goes to Magnolia Country,” with her blond curls, blue eyes and polka-dot dress with ruffled shoulders. She seemed to be intently watching the couples on the floor, but it was her finger, nonetheless.

“What is this secret project, Sergeant?” she asked in a voice just loud enough for him to hear. “What do you think they’re making?”

“Why don’t you ask your husband?”

“Captain Augustino took me to a nightclub in Albuquerque last week.” Her nail continued like a little blade down the groove of his back. “You were playing. I was struck by how gently you played. Is it because your fingers are so big?”

“Not gently. Carefully. I stay out of trouble.” By twisting on the bench to look at her, he managed to dislodge her nail. Sad: nineteen, twenty years old, and already a bored Army wife. “What do you think they’re doing here, Mrs. Augustino? What’s your opinion?”

She brushed curls from her face and surveyed the room. “I think the whole thing is a hoax. They’re dodging the draft. All these so-called scientists got together and pulled the wool over the Army’s eyes. They’re smart enough to do it.”

“Yeah,” he had to agree, “they are.”

During the break, Joe maneuvered around some of the “so-called scientists” to get to the bar. The Hungarian, Teller, his eyebrows rising like fans, brayed over a joke told by Fermi. A short man, Fermi was fit and balding and wore a rough double-breasted suit and thick-soled shoes that curled at the toe like an Italian peasant’s. Other physicists called him the Pope.

Oppy was showing a circle of admirers how to build the perfect martini. “Firm instructions should always be in German.” He had the trick of lowering his voice so that listeners had to lean forward, and as they did he poured gin to the brim of the glass. “Am wichtigsten, der Gin sollte gekühlt sein, kein Eis.”

“Bourbon,” Joe told Foote, who, drunk or not, was tending bar.

“Zwei Tröpfeln Wermut, nicht mehr, nicht weniger, und eine Olive.” Oppy added enough vermouth to cause an oily swirl in the gin, then handed his concoction to a woman who would have been noticeable simply because she wore black coveralls that suggested she was a member of an army of Amazons, or labored in a factory of mourners, or had been dipped in ink. But it was the sheer intellectual cast of her face that really set her off. Blacker than black hair cut in severe bangs around eyes that were blue-gray with dark edges that dilated with dislike, like a cat’s. Strong nose, full mouth and the sort of fair complexion that scorned the sun.

“A double,” Joe told Foote.

Oppy said, “Joe, this is Dr. Anna Weiss. Joe is my oldest friend here, Anna.”

Drinks in hand, Anna Weiss and Joe dismissed each other with a nod.

“I missed my first year at Harvard,” Oppy persisted. “My family sent me to New Mexico for my health. They contracted with Joe’s father, a renowned bootlegger.”

“So?” She had a low voice, a German accent and no interest.

“Tell her, Joe,” Oppy said.

“My dad also rented packhorses and experienced guides for dude parties,” Joe said. “I was the experienced guide. I was twelve. One of the first times I went out, I had a kid from New York. Sixteen and so tall and skinny that the first time I saw him in swimming trunks I thought he was going to die on the trail.”

“I couldn’t ride,” Oppy said.

“He couldn’t ride to save his life,” Joe said, “but he liked to go out at night to see stars, and he was so damned night-blind I had to hold back every branch on the way. One night we got caught in a rainstorm and I got under my horse to stay dry. I heard this guy yelling in the rain.”

“I thought he’d left me,” Oppy said.

“I told him to come down under the horse with me. He came down, soaked, and said, ‘Gee!’ He’d never thought of the possibility of getting under a horse in the rain. It loomed like a brilliant idea to him.”

“It struck me as an offer of eternal friendship,” Oppy said. “At the end of the rain, he led me up to the Ranch School here, to this very place, for some coffee and dry clothes. That was twenty years ago.”

Her eyes moved from man to man as if they were describing a previous life as idiots.

“Better switch back to German,” Joe told Oppy and took his drink out to the patio. There was a low moon over the mountains and a liquid coolness to the air. By the flagstones was a garden shadowed by poplars. Los Alamos means “the poplars.”

What are they doing here? An atomic bomb, a nuclear device—whatever those words signified. He couldn’t help knowing the terminology from being Oppy’s driver and overhearing incomprehensible conversations in the backseat. Chain reaction? Fast neutrons and slow neutrons? It was all a different language, like Sanskrit. Of course, Oppy knew Sanskrit.

Joe set his drink on a flagstone and lit his first cigarette of the day. He still had the habits of a fighter trying to stay in shape, although for what he didn’t know.

As Teller came out the doors, he said, “Joe, you could take lessons and become a real pianist. You could play Beethoven.”

“Ah, the big-band sound,” Joe said. As soon as he could he picked up his drink and slipped away from a fierce analysis of the American jitterbug. Teller had a wooden leg.

Joe was nearly at the doors when his way was blocked by Anna Weiss, the woman Oppy had been instructing in the manufacture of martinis. She was now in the company of another émigré with a bland and pasty face, straw-colored hair and rimless glasses. His name was Klaus Fuchs. Joe couldn’t remember ever passing a single word with him, but apparently Fuchs had been giving Fräulein Weiss the usual Los Alamos tour: There are the mountains, there are the mesas, there is the Indian.

“You were, in fact, the one who first brought Oppy here?” she asked Joe.

Joe nodded. “This was a private school then. A year at the Ranch School cost more than Harvard. The war wiped it out.”

“And led you back. That is irony?”

“No, that’s pure Army.”

The two of them seemed to stare at Joe from the far end of a scale of intelligence.

“Kitty is telling everyone you are musical,” she said. “Klaus says you have no actual ability.”

Fuchs shrugged. “It should be enough to be a war hero.”

“You’re kind,” Joe said. “Of course, it’s important to be on the right side of the war.”

“They grow up with rifles here, Dr. Fuchs,” a voice said from the dark of the garden. “It’s a simple thing to be a war hero if you can fire a rifle.”

“I have never shot anything,” Fuchs said.

“Of course not.” Captain Augustino took a step toward the patio, just enough for them to see him. “In fact, we’re in hunting season now. I wouldn’t go wandering in the woods.”

“Naturally,” Fuchs said.

“A moon like this, maybe snow, every Indian is going to be out for his deer tonight. It could be dangerous.”

“Yes, yes.”

Fuchs seemed to regard Augustino the same as he did Joe. The captain had a sallow face but his hair was thick and glossy as fur, so he had the animal quality that also clung to Joe. It was as if Fuchs and Anna Weiss had evolved to the next step in human development, leaving Joe and the captain behind, a pair of Stone Age predators.

“Do you mind if I speak to the sergeant alone?” The arc of Augustino’s cigarette waved Joe out.

“Please,” Fuchs said.

Although the ground was frozen, Augustino was in his tunic. Joe couldn’t tell how long he had been listening.

“Our Germans. I’ll say one thing for Fuchs, he’s scrupulous about security, unlike some people. Sergeant, are you aware of the improvement in the living standards of the people in the local pueblos since you arrived on the Hill? Cigarettes, tires from the motor pool, sugar from the commissary. Particularly disturbing is the rumor that Indians have opened some of the old turquoise mines.”

“You don’t like Indian jewelry, sir?”

“What I don’t like is the idea that they’re blasting open the mines with high explosive. There’s only one place in this part of the country for them to get explosives, Sergeant, and that’s the Hill. I’d hate to think any of my men were stealing Army property to sell for personal profit.”

“Indians are pretty poor, sir. He can’t be making too much profit.”

“Then that makes him stupid, too.”

“If he’s that stupid, he’ll make a slip. I’ll watch for him, sir.”

“Do that. In the meantime, General Groves has arrived at the guesthouse. Wrap up the music. Since you’ll be taking the general and Dr. Oppenheimer to see the Alamogordo range tomorrow, I want you to get a good night’s sleep. The fate of the world will be riding in the car you’ll be driving, so it would be nice if you were bright and sober. Agreed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please be aware, Sergeant, that I am unhappy with the quality of information that you’ve been giving me lately. We have a deal. You’re on provisional assignment to me. That’s probation. You go back to the brig anytime I say. Now, you return inside and give them a couple more tunes and send our civilians home happy. By the way, do you know the difference between a nigger playing the piano and an Indian playing the piano?”

“No, sir.”

“Funny, neither do I.”

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